Grand Concourse

The Grand Concourse is a major thoroughfare in The Bronx, New York City. The Grand Concourse was designed by the city's chief topographical engineer, the Alsatian immigrant Louis Aloys Risse, and it was opened to traffic in November 1909. By the mid-1930s, almost 300 apartment buildings had been built along the Concourse, and privately financed apartments continued to be built, even as the construction of city apartments was halted by the Great Depression. However, the once glamorous Grand Concourse was drained of its good reputation during the 1960s as white flight led to many of the South Bronx's residents moving to the suburbs. 170,000 African-American and Puerto Rican people displaced by slum clearance in Manhattan moved to The Bronx, and migration the suburbs, retirement to Florida, and the construction of Co-op City in the fringes of the northeastern Bronx during the 1960s and 1970s drained the areas along the Concourse of most of its remaining middle-class residents. Most buildings in the area were damaged by arson, vandalism, and a lack of maintenance, and some buildings and apartments were left abandoned and boarded or bricked shut. Starting in the 1990s, a wave of affordable housing came to the area, and the area experienced some revival. Severe crime rates went down as new people moved in, and a young professional ("yuppie") community developed in the southern portion.